Your press release email gets harvested faster than you think — here's how to stop it

The moment your press release lands on a wire service, something else happens: bots begin reading it. Not journalists — bots. Scrapers that crawl newswires continuously, looking for fresh email addresses to harvest and resell.

The average harvested email begins receiving unsolicited pitches within two to four hours of distribution. By 24 hours, it's on multiple lists. By a week, you've probably muted the inbox entirely — which means the journalists you actually wanted to hear from also can't reach you.

This is not a hypothetical. It is the standard outcome for anyone who publishes a raw email address in a media-contact section.

The two bad options most people choose

Option 1: Publish your real address anyway

Some PR teams accept the spam tax. They figure a flooded inbox is a cost of doing business. But this calculus breaks down fast: filtering noise at scale is genuinely expensive in time, and real pitches get lost. One missed inquiry from a wire reporter isn't catastrophic. Three missed ones are a pattern.

Option 2: Omit the contact entirely (go dark)

Others solve the spam problem by not publishing a contact email at all. This "works" in the narrow sense that you don't get scraped — because no one can reach you. Editors who want to verify facts, journalists chasing a quick quote, photographers asking for a hi-res logo: all of them hit a wall and move on. A press release without a reachable contact is a press release that underperforms.

The third option: a captcha-gated forwarding link

What you actually want is something a journalist can click and use, but a bot cannot harvest and resell. A forwarding link — a URL that collects a message and routes it to your real inbox — solves both problems simultaneously. The journalist sees a contact form, submits their query, and you receive it. Scrapers see a URL that yields no raw email.

PressReleaseContact provides exactly this: you generate a link, paste it into the media-contact field of your release as "Contact via form," and the actual delivery address is never exposed in the markup or the source.

Three defenses in depth

A well-designed forwarding service isn't one protection — it's three layered together.

1. Visible CAPTCHA

A human-visible challenge (standard checkbox CAPTCHA or equivalent) blocks automated form submissions. Bots that do click the link can't complete the form. You can read more about how this works on the how it works page.

2. Disposable-email blocking

Some humans who fill out contact forms are not journalists — they're lead-gen scrapers using throwaway addresses. A blocklist of known disposable-email domains (mailinator, guerrillamail, and hundreds of variants) prevents these submissions from being forwarded. You only see mail from real domains.

3. Rate limiting

A single IP or form session can only submit a bounded number of times within a window. This stops low-sophistication bots that don't bother spoofing IPs, and it prevents harassment campaigns from flooding your forwarding queue.

These three layers together mean that what reaches your inbox is, overwhelmingly, legitimate contact from humans who read your release and have something real to ask.

What this means for how you write the media-contact section

The shift is small on the writing side. Instead of:

Media Contact:
Jane Doe, Head of Communications
[email protected]
+1 (555) 000-0000

You write:

Media Contact:
Jane Doe, Head of Communications
Contact via form: [link]
+1 (555) 000-0000

Wire services accept this. Editors accept this. The form link is a recognized convention now — not a red flag. See our full breakdown in Press release "Media Contact" section: everything you need to know for exactly what language to use and what to leave out.

What you don't have to change

You don't need to change your distribution strategy, your wire service, or your approval workflow. The forwarding link replaces one field in one section. Everything else stays the same.

A note on phone numbers

Phone numbers are also harvested, but at a much lower rate and with much higher friction to abuse. The math on publishing a phone number is different from publishing an email address. Phone contact in a press release is generally still fine.

FAQ link

Common questions about how forwarding works, what happens to submissions, and how your real address is kept private are answered in the FAQ.

Key takeaways